Susan Sgorbati teaches on the dance faculty at Bennington College and carries with her experience as a choreographer, artistic director, and dancer. Her research focus is on improvisation and its link to the science of complex systems, Emergent Improvisation. Her work is accomplished through collaboration with experts from other academic fields including biology, neuroscience, and anthropology.
We do as we think. The mind-body connection is evident in our lives on a daily basis. What appears to be mere improvisation: playful banter in fact can serve as useful place of analysis that can reveal a great deal about our internal processing mechanisms. Perhaps Sigmund Freud said it best, “There are no mistakes”. What one may write off as mere accident or chance is in fact the consequence of a complex interaction oneself and the surrounding environment. Music/dance improvisation operates the same way, as Sgorbati’s work attempts to explain.
Sgorbati’ ideas are not unique to her experience in the arts. “I’ve come to ask whether there are deep universal structuring principles that cross the disciplines of art, science, and human culture” (Sgorbati). The work of neuroscientist Dr. Gerald Edeleman explains similar ideas in his theory of consciousness (integration and differentiation) and his representation of memory as “dynamic and emergent” (Sgorbati). Dr. Stuart Kauffman, a founding member of the Santa Fe (the top center for sciences of complexity), investigates the principles of adaptation “poised between order and chaos” (Sgorbati). Clearly, Sgorbati’s own work in dance and music improvisation holds a strong level of relevance and support to the academic community as a whole.
Sgorbati describes the three core elements of Emergent Improvisation: self-organization, emergence, and complexity and their relationship to the science of complexity. Through self-structuring of many interrelated components, an original outcome emerges. This self-organization can only take place when improvisers are given specific constraints or rules that guide the improvisation along. Alongside this, the dancers must remain attentive to themselves and their relationship to the shifting environment around them.
“The implications for the practice of Emergent Improvisation cross disciplines and enter daily life on many levels. On a personal level, it allows an individual to uniquely define her/his own potential for expression and then negotiate that vocabulary in relationship with others in the environment. On an ensemble level, our experience gives us a basis to question when emergent complex systems can be more efficient and adaptive than hierarchical systems.” This excerpt from Sgorbati’s article really resonates with me. We live in a world of hierarchical systems. There are ways we are taught to conduct our lives. When you get a job, you’re given a designated role structured by a list of rules- innovation is often discouraged. We are set to act as those before us and to disregard our intuition. After all, those before us must have been knowledgeable enough. We trust and value that imposed systems at hand are efficient and necessary. Why reinvent the wheel? But what if improvements could exist? What if the wheel could be vastly improved? There’s no way for us to tell unless we stray off of the beaten past and discover what else is out there.
When I showed my own choreographic work this semester, my mentor, Nikolais dancer Gerald Otte, made clear his distaste for unison. In his eyes, Gerald saw perfect unison as impossible to obtain (especially in the college setting) and therefore should be avoided at all costs. Rather, he encouraged that I try unison of an idea not of movement. Sgorbati’s discussion of complexity and emergence relates to this notion. During dance improvisations, many elements are at work… and the relationships that form between them form around a core something, a new idea that pushes the improvisation forward. From the concentrated efforts of many different bodies and minds, something unpredictable emerges that reflects a sense of unity
At times, I am drawn to second guess myself. I don’t trust my own decision making. I become tense. Stalled. I stutter in my brain and body. I can’t move forward. Dance improvisation liberates me. Tells me it’s okay to be myself. Let’s me know that I am something beautiful. That I am something right. That I can make decisions. That I can be deliberate in a world where I often feel so stifled and confined. Improvisation lets me be me. Reminds me that I’m a someone… not just a something. It’s self-validating and self-empowering.
But as much as dance improvisation can be seen as my personal escape, this escape also reveals the connective tissues of myself with the universe around me. What we do is a product of how we think. Our actions are structured by how our minds process the world around us, and improvisation, in all its unfiltered rawness, provides an unfiltered glimpse into this realm. Working off of this idea, I understand how Sgorbati finds patterns and cohesion within the chaos of improvisation. After all, chaos is never chaos. Many variables may be at play, but the chaos is always orchestrated and therefore produces what can be seen as cohesive to the outside observer.
Through dance improvisation, I become hyper aware of my shared humanity. I may be one individual in a universe much larger than myself. But I come to realize that I am cut from the same fabric. This is why improvisation can be beautiful to observe and participate in. Because it reminds us of that despite what me may think from time to time, that we are not so different from one another. And that the differences that do emerge hold a valuable, beautiful, and necessary part in the making of the whole.
http://emergentimprovisation.org/Essay-on-Emergent-Improvisation.html
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